North Korea called President Barack Obama "a monkey" and blamed the
U.S. on Saturday for shutting down its Internet amid the hacking row
over the comedy "The Interview."

North Korea has denied
involvement in a crippling cyberattack on Sony Pictures but has
expressed fury over the comedy depicting an assassination of its leader
Kim Jong Un. After Sony Pictures initially called off the release in a
decision criticized by Obama, the movie has opened this week.

On Saturday, the North's powerful National Defense Commission, the
country's top governing body led by Kim, said that Obama was behind the
release of "The Interview." It described the movie as illegal, dishonest
and reactionary.

"Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds
like a monkey in a tropical forest," an unidentified spokesman at the
commission's Policy Department said in a statement carried by the
official Korean Central News Agency.

"If the U.S. is to persistently insist that the hacking attack was made
by the DPRK, the U.S. should produce evidence without fail, though
belatedly," the statement publish by KCNA said.

He also accused Washington
for intermittent outages of North Korea websites this week, after the
U.S. had promised to respond to the Sony hack.

There was no immediate reaction from the White House on Saturday.

According
to the North Korea commission's spokesman, "the U.S., a big country,
started disturbing the Internet operation of major media of the DPRK,
not knowing shame like children playing a tag."
The commission
said the movie was the results of a hostile U.S. policy toward North
Korea, and threatened the U.S. with unspecified consequences.

North
Korea and the U.S. remain technically in a state of war because the
1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. The
rivals also are locked in an international standoff over the North's
nuclear and missile programs and its alleged human rights abuses. The
U.S. stations about 28,500 troops in South Korea as deterrence against
North Korean aggression.